Microsoft Risks it All

April 1, 2014January 10, 2017

By Chris Davies, Manager of Technical Services

In a recent article in ComputerWorld it was postulated that Microsoft risks ruin by ending support for Windows XP. The article opined that they are reckless to terminate support for the 13 year old operating system. If I followed that logic I am now ready to post my protest about the lack of warranty support for my 13 year old Whirlpool Refrigerator, actually I am rendered speechless that the thing is still running.

I suppose in some utopian world a company that employs a not insignificant number of employees should continue to support software at no cost indefinitely, unfortunately we live in a world where people expect to get paid and shareholders see increased value or dividends.

All good things come to an end, if I had my way I’d still be running Windows 2000, but I am a pragmatist and I type this blog on a system running Windows 7.

So who actually risks ruin with the upcoming XP end of life, well if you are running XP in your company systems, possibly you! Microsoft has certainly not been guilty of holding back about this, for the last few years it has been quite vocal that XP support is going to end. If you haven’t heard about this I presume you have been hiding out in a cave east of the Ural Mountains.

Windows 7 was released in October of 2009, given that was four and a half years ago any system running XP has to be at least that old or you intentionally decided to load an older operating system. I have one system at home that is five years old, that came delivered with Windows Vista, I have suffered with it for long enough and it is due for retirement very soon, I certainly would not be running my business on it or any systems running XP.

Given this I wonder who are the XP holdouts? I am sure there are plenty of unofficial copies floating around, for those users…..well need I say more. I would be very surprised to see a huge number of legitimate home users still running XP, as I state above it has required going out of your way to purchase a replacement system with XP loaded. If you are running your business on XP I refer you to my comment at the end of the last paragraph.

Finally one parting thought, it was commented on in the article that the newer versions of Windows did not support all of the applications that the users needed. Again I am not sure why anyone would be running any 5 year old versions of applications software without having considered updating. If nothing else I suspect there might have been a few security updates to the apps!